Larry’s Comments (group member since Nov 23, 2020)

Larry’s comments from the Nonfiction Reading - Only the Best group.

John, I just read that review a moment ago. That book relates changes that affects writers, readers, and indeed society in major ways. I do want to read it.

In both high school and college, friends (usually female friends) were reading the Brontes. But for me also, they were never taught and barely mentioned.

John wrote: "I don’t think I can make the effort for the novel itself, but I have been reading several essays about George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

I had always assumed the gold standard of Victorian..."

"Middlemarch has been described by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language."

John, I talked with my son, Jamie, this morning and asked him when was the last time he ate at an In-N-Out Burger, thinking that it was about 15 months ago on a trip to California. He surprised me by saying "Last Thursday." He had gone to Flagstaff to a meeting with the Navajo Nation and hit a In-N-Out Burger in Phoenix before he flew back to DC. He usually doesn't like most fast food chains but he loves this one.

John,

I have this book. I do plan to read it. I only wish that there was an In-N-Out Burger close to the DC area.

Thanks, Acorn! Great review.

I'm now on Chapter 5 ... it's packed full of information, but you quickly realize that Indonesia is so complicated that her own personal journey reveals a lot but probably also misses a lot. That doesn't matter very much to me, because her insights are enough to make it valuable. I'll share some of these "insights" from Chapter 4:

Remarkably few Indonesians live in other countries. There are plenty of other “foreign” places to discover in Indonesia, so most Indonesians don't feel a need to leave their country. Those who do often are recruited ot be "guest-workers" in other countries like Malaysia/

The official language Malay/Indonesian is grammatically very simple. It is good that Javanese, a very complex language, was not adopted as the national language, becasue Malay/Indonesian has become a unifying feature.

Green vegetables aren’t eaten much, especially in the eastern islands, and the result is widespread malnutrition.

Malaysia now has a per capital income three times that of Indonesia … after starting off the same in 1957.

"Larry, I have a Nook Glowlight, but my preference is the Nook app on my iPad." The Kindle app on the iPad is better for a lot of books than the Kindle itself. That's obvious for books like art books but it goes beyond that. But Kindles and Nooks (all so-called eInk devices) are easier on the eyes for extended reading. Goodbye to All That was one of the few books that I read as a paper book in recent times. I had a trade paperback ... that is now heavily marked up.

John, you mentioned your Nook. I use a Kindle and hence buy ebooks from Amazon or borrow them from the public library to read on my Kindle.

I also read books on the Apple books app but have never bought a book from the iBooks store ... only read free books with it. And I've bought a few hundred books from the Google Play Book store, but I rarely buy them from there any longe. They don't update their Google Play Books app frequently enough and there are a few books where you get a message of "Missing fonts." That doesn't affect the whole book ... just some pages. But it's still frustrating.

I don;t know anyone who buys books from Apple iBook store, or Google Play Books, or the Kobo store. I throw in that last store, because the Kobo reader has been getting some great reviews.

John wrote: "My favorite Barnes & Noble was in Cincinnati. Actually, it was in the shops across the Ohio River in Covington, Kentucky. It was very large and you could take an escalator to the second floor that had a large reading area with windows looking to the Ohio and Cincinnati. It was a great place.."

My favorite also! I was only in it one time. My son and I flew into Cincinnati to see the Dolphins play the Bengals. On Saturday we visited that store and it was like Heaven. Just the best. That was a long time ago ... when Dan Marino was playing quarterback for the Dolphins ... and he retired in 1999.

Carol wrote: "It's interesting how shops have changed over the last 50 years. Down in the town center here there are many shops boarded up, most of the larger shops have long since disappeared, but there are sti..."

Carol, your whole comment is so worth reading and reflects what is going on in probably most U.S. cities and towns. Most but not all. It seems that the successful cities and towns don't have their experience replicated by the unsuccessful ones, and I think that's often because the reasons for the successes are many and complex. Just a s one example, the downtown and many ethic neightborhoods of Pittsburgh continue to thrive while Baltimore generally suffers. Both went through the virtual collapse of their steel industries, but Pittsburgh recovered especially because of Carnegie Mellon University and the medical complex ... while Johns Hopkins University (thriving as it is as a university) hasn't managed to transfer its life to the neighborhoods of Baltimore.

The power that the new CEO is giving to individual Barnes & Noble store managers is stunning. He even let one manager rename the store to B. Dalton's, which was the name of an old bookstore. I think that you can access this NYT story about the B&N changes here. (It's a so-called gift article.). https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/st...

"Mr. Daunt believes in local experimentation to such an extreme degree that last year he allowed a Barnes & Noble in Oviedo, Fla., to change its name. The Oviedo Mall is now the site of the nation’s one and only B. Dalton Bookseller store, named after a chain that Barnes & Noble acquired in 1987 and liquidated in 2010. In a demonstration of the company’s commitment to inconsistency, the location now has a blue and red B. Dalton Bookseller sign above the entrance — and Barnes & Noble-branded materials within."

And so, Carol, for me, I also mainly buy online ... or borrow books (mainly ebooks in Kindle format) from our public library. It's really good for fiction and just okay for nonfiction.

Carol wrote: "Independent book shops in Britain have now reached their highest number in 10 years. I was rather surprised to read that but it is interesting. For myself I buy everything online these days, includ..."

In a large population area like Fairfax County, Virginia, you would think that we would have a number of great independent book stores. Sadly, no. We have one that is quite good but a bit inconvenient and another that specializes in books on politics, hence its name Politics and Prose. We had another Bard's Alley, that we were patronizing, but the staff really was not helpful the last two visits. I will say that about 45 minutes away in Manassas (Prince William County), there is a wonderful (and huge) used book store. This is McKay's Used Books. My son regularly visits this one.

Roberto wrote: "I just have to say it is one heck of a ride. I am 3 Laws in and this book feels illegal to read..." Glad to have you with us, Roberto. If you REALLY want to read something, that I have real doubts about the risks to the reader and those whom the reader might affect, try Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Maybe you should forget that I just suggested that to you. :-)

As for Amazon, the Kindle experience is one of the things that Amazon has not made worse. The Search function of something you want to buy from Amazon s probably worse than it was ten years ago ... as Amazon tried to push you toward products it favors. I wish the FTC and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department would really get a better grip on how monopoly power is misused ... instead of focusing on things like the Mirosoft-Activision merger. My life is not affected one bit by that and is affected by how Google, Amazon, etc. control what we see in searches. Oh and back to that Kindle experience ... I really don't trust Amazon not to make it worse.

John wrote: "I like Barnes & Noble a lot. I don’t get to the actual store, but I like my Nook. I am not a fan of Amazon. ..."

The individual stores started getting a lot better a few years ago when the new British CEO turned over a lot of control to the individual store managers and employees. I probably visit the closest store about six times a year. Last Christmas, we took our granddaughters there to buy books ... the help from one employee for my older granddaughter was enough to make me keep on visiting that store instead of returning to a local independent bookstore that once had been good but had deteriorated a lot in both stock and help from employees there.

Kenzie, that's quite a relocation, but I bet it works out great! How is your French?

In any case, we are most happy to have you here!

Larry

John, I always have at least one fiction book going and two nonfiction books in progress … but it may be more. And I usually have one graphic novel or collected comic book going also.

And another one.

The Wild Iris
by Louise Glück

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.